The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) is investigating electronic voting in the country and how it might improve the election process.

This week, the IEC held a three-day conference in Cape Town about e-voting systems, which – not surprisingly – have been hugely positive for the countries which have used them.

Will you cast your electronic vote?

Estonia, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo all gave enthusiastic reports of how much easier – and, significantly, cheaper – electronic voting is. Instead of a ballot for every voter, you only need to print one ballot per voting machine.

Those machines are reusable, so the cost of printing tens of millions of ballot papers is removed.

This is obviously the most notable benefit, but there are numerous others. Apart from saving on costs, it reduces the risk of human error in counting the ballots; while these machines can be used just as easily in remote rural areas as a Joburg suburb. They’re easier for the elderly and disabled to use too.

“The ultimate goal of digital transformation should be to ensure that queues get shorter, not longer, on voting day,” Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said at the event.

“The efficiency of any electronic system should be better, not worse, than the existing paper-based system. There is frankly no point in digitalising a process if it is going to be just as slow, inefficient and insecure as the manual, paper-based process that preceded it,” he said.

Read More: Servers and skills – the two must-haves for the future

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So we’re not expecting any issues when it comes to letting users choose which smartphone released in 2020 was the very best of the best. But that might be because we’re asking you to settle matters using an internet form, rather than all stuffed into a room somewhere. First of all, the latter is a stupid idea in this day and age and, secondly, that’s just a recipe for a fight. It’s far better to vote, so you don’t punch your neighbour in the head because he’s a dumbass with the wrong opinion. That’s how governments work.

Dialling up a Reader Smartphone of the Year

As with our other voting initiatives, the Reader Smartphone of the Year process is simple. We’ve got a collection of high-end phones (plus a couple from both the lower- and upper-mid range — because we like to mix things up a little) for you to select from. All of them were serious contenders for the best phone in 2020. Any of them could take the crown. But that’s up to you.

There were a few restrictions on which phones were included in the list. If they’re not readily available in South Africa, they didn’t make the cut (sorry Sony). If they were outrageously priced (sorry, Galaxy Fold 2) then we also left them off the list. You’ll see that everything on the list below is at least kiiiinda affordable, in that they’ll cost the price of a mostly-busted second-hand car rather than a fair solid one.

Our contract with you

Voting for the Stuff Reader Smartphone of the Year is easy. Pick your favourite, enter your details and you’re done. But there were a whole mess of smartphones released in 2020. It’s entirely possible we overlooked something. We’ve allowed for that. If there’s something that should be on this list and isn’t, you can write it in in the last entry. If we get enough of those, we’ll add the gadget to the list of nominees — at the very least. It could even win.

As for your name and email address: we won’t be using those for marketing. We’re just collecting that info to make certain that no brigading goes on. Not that we’re expecting any, but you never know. We’ll be collecting votes until just before the first official issue of Stuff’s print magazine goes to print on 22 January. After that, if you haven’t had your say, then we’re afraid you’re out of luck. Just like real life, if you don’t vote then you don’t get what you want.

The post We’re putting together Stuff’s Reader Smartphone of the Year award and we need your help appeared first on Stuff South Africa.

Stuff

Making the Reader Gadget of the Year

Choosing Stuff‘s Gadget of the Year is a simple process. First we get a boat and a bunch of monkeys with the names of the nominees on their little shirts, , head out to international waters, give them all knives and… wait, that’s an episode of The Simpsons. And it’s horrifying.

Rather, the Stuff team settles matters using calm, sober discussion (at length) about which device is most suited to be our Gadget of the Year. Bribery doesn’t work and nor does begging, negging or… egging? Only cold, hard facts get a piece of tech to the head of the line. But this particular queue isn’t ours to judge. That one’s on you — our annual reader-chosen Gadget of the Year award relies on your opinions of what the best tech of the past orbital period was.  We’ve provided the nominees, and we want you to choose your favourites from the list.

The method

All you gotta do is scroll down to the form and select your favourite. That’s it. That’s all we need. That said, we’re not perfect. It’s entirely possible we overlooked something. We’ve allowed for that. If there’s something that should be on this list and isn’t, you can write it in in the last entry. If we get enough of those, we’ll add the gadget to the list of nominees — at the very least. It could even win.

As for your name and email address: we won’t be using those for marketing. We’re just collecting that info to make certain that no brigading goes on. Not that we’re expecting any, but you never know. We’ll be collecting votes until just before the first official issue of Stuff’s print magazine goes to print on 22 January. After that, if you haven’t had your say, then we’re afraid you’re out of luck. Just like real life, if you don’t vote then you don’t get what you want.

The post Stuff’s Reader Gadget of the Year award could use some input from you appeared first on Stuff South Africa.

On the face of it, companies such as Google and Facebook claim to provide a free service to all their users. But in practice, they harvest huge amounts of personal data and sell it on to others for profit. They’re able to do this every time you log into social media, ask a question on a search engine or store files on a cloud service. The internet is slowly turning into something like the current financial system, which centrally monitors all transactions and uses that data to predict what people will buy in future.

This type of monitoring has huge implications for the privacy of ordinary people around the world. The digital currency Bitcoin, which surfaced on the internet in 2008, sought to break the influence that large, private bodies have over what we do online. The researchers had finally solved one of the biggest concerns with digital currencies – that they need central control by the companies that operate them, in the same way traditional currencies are controlled by a bank.

The core idea behind the Bitcoin system is to make all the participants in the system, collectively, the bank. To do this, blockchains are used. Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof ledgers, which can record every transaction made within a network. The ledger is distributed in the sense that a synchronised copy of the blockchain is maintained by each of the participants in the network, and tamper-proof in the sense that each of the transactions in the ledger is locked into place using a strong encrypting technique called hashing.

More than a decade since this technology emerged, we’re still only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential. People researching it may have overlooked one of its most useful applications – making the internet better for everyone who uses it.

Help stamp out hate

In order to use services on the internet such as social media, email and cloud data storage, people need to authenticate themselves to the service provider. The way to do this at the moment is to come up with a username and password and register an account with the provider. But at the moment, there’s no way to verify the user’s identity. Anyone can create an account on platforms like Facebook and use it to spread fake news and hatred, without fear of ever being identified and caught.

Our idea is to issue each citizen with a digital certificate by first verifying their identity. An organisation like your workplace, university or school knows your identity and is in a position to issue you with a certificate. If other organisations do the same for their members, we could put these certificates on a publicly accessible blockchain and create a global protected record of every internet user’s identity.

Since there’d be a means for identifying users with their digital certificate, social media accounts could be linked to real people. A school could create social media groups which could only be accessed if a student had a certificate issued to them by the school, preventing the group being infiltrated by outsiders.

Never forget a password again

A user could ask for a one-time password (OTP) for Facebook by clicking an icon on their mobile phone. Facebook would then look up the user’s digital certificate on the blockchain and return an OPT to their phone. The OTP will be encrypted so that it cannot be seen by anyone else apart from the intended recipient. The user would then login to the service using their username and the OTP, thereby eliminating the need to remember passwords. The OTP changes with each login and is delivered encrypted to your phone, so it’s much more difficult to guess or steal a password.

Vote with your phone

People are often too busy or reluctant to go to a polling station on voting days. An internet voting system could change that. Digital currencies like Zerocash are fully anonymous and can be traced on the blockchain, giving it the basic ingredients for a voting system. Anyone can examine the blockchain and confirm that a particular token has been transferred between two parties without revealing their identities.

Each candidate could be given a digital wallet and each eligible voter given a token. Voters cast their token into the wallet of their preferred candidate using their mobile phone. If the total number of tokens in the wallets is less than or equal to the number issued, then you have a valid poll and the candidate with the most tokens is declared the winner.

No more tech companies selling your data

People use search engines everyday, but this allows companies like Google to gather trends, create profiles and sell this valuable information to marketing companies. If internet users were to use a digital currency to make a micropayment – perhaps one-hundredth of a cent – for each search query that they perform, there would be less incentive for a search company to sell their personal data. Even if someone performed a hundred search queries per day they would end up paying only one cent – a small price to pay for one’s privacy.

Blockchain technology started as a means for making online transactions anonymous, but it would be shame for it to stop there. The more researchers like me think about its potential, the more exciting possibilities emerge.

• Hitesh Tewari is Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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